Prodigal Sons Page 8

“You gonna be doing any talking this trip?”

  He rubbed his eyes, turned to her and said, “That looks like it hurts.”

  Her mouth turned into a thin frown. She stole his cigarette again, took a long drag and let it out in a trembling breath. He lit another cigarette, watched her take off her sunglasses and look at him. It wasn’t pretty.

  “My foster agent checks in every other Monday. They don’t like it when their children can’t be accounted for for the last twelve hours.”

  Matthew smoked his cigarette.

  “I guess he thought he’d show me.” She touched her pugilist’s eye. The bubbled lids were nearly swollen shut. “To hell with him.” She put her shades back on.

  Then it hit Matthew, the fact that she didn’t have anywhere better to go. Was he really her best alternative? He fought an urge to rub away the tear falling down her cheek. She rubbed it herself.

  “Here.” He handed her a bottle of beer.

  “To drink?”

  He put the car in gear. “Hold it against your eye. Try and get that swelling to go down.” Back on the freeway, he opened another bottle for himself. “A few sips wouldn’t kill you.”

  He chose the Bellagio, leaving the jeep, encrusted with desert sand, with a valet. There was a beautifully manufactured view—in front, a synthetic lake and across the street, a phony half-sized Eiffel Tower identified the Paris Casino. It was good enough for Tommy. He wondered if she could have named the tower or placed Paris on a map.

  “This is gorgeous.” It was all reflected in her shades, all brand new to her, like Cinderella at the ball.

  The lobby, like all of the new Vegas, was overdone. Too bright, too big, too much. He loved it. The ceiling a collision of unnaturally colored yellow and super purple wax umbrellas melting in the sun. Tommy sat on a circular couch and waited while he checked in. In Vegas, sunglasses at night didn’t look out of place. He got two rooms with a view of the lagoon, price be damned.

  Their rooms were on the fifteenth floor, connected by adjoining doors. Tommy squealed watching the fountain show in the lagoon. A channel on the TV played the music that the water danced to outside. He showed her just like he’d shown Lu the last time he’d been there.

  Matthew and Lu had come to Vegas a few months back for an affiliate meeting. He tried to imagine that Lu was just in the bathroom getting ready or downstairs shopping. He opened the mini bar and poured a mini coke and a mini Jack Daniel’s into a glass. It tasted about right, lasted about as long as the fountain show outside. Jets of water shot twenty and fifty feet into the air to the theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark. Tommy applauded when it stopped.

  Matthew brushed his teeth and took out Ron’s check. Tommy was already asleep. He made himself another miniature drink and went downstairs. Cashed the check at the front desk.

  The Golden Nugget was a short cab ride away.

  Located in the heart of old Vegas, where the neon cowboy waves at you, the Golden Nugget, compared to the strip, was low key and tasteful. It had suited his grandfather, not Matthew. The casino and the gamblers and the dealers were older, quieter, the carpets thinner. People came here to gamble, they didn’t need any bells or whistles.

  The ceilings were mirrored. It gave him the brief impression of looking down on the crowd from above, finding himself there. Another sucker. Fuck it, he thought and sat at a roulette table. The blackjack tables were quiet. He wondered where his grandfather had placed his last bet. Pictured him doubling down or maybe splitting a pair of eights. “How are you tonight, sir?” the roulette dealer asked.

  Matthew read the name tag on the lapel of the hideous vest, “Feeling lucky, Marty.” He put the money onto the green felt.

  Marty counted it. “Changing ten thousand.”

  “Thousands please.”

  Marty stacked ten chips in front of Matthew.

  Matthew placed all ten of them on the black diamond.

  The table grew quiet.

  “Good luck,” an old lady whispered to him from behind clownishly big glasses.

  “Thanks.”

  Marty waved his hands palms up. “No more bets.”

  He didn’t look at the wheel as it spun. The ball dropped and stopped.

  “Eighteen black.”

  A sigh.

  Marty placed ten chips next to the first stack. He wore no expression.

  “What do you think Marty?”

  “I think that’s twenty thousand dollars sir.”

  “Can I bet that much?”

  Marty motioned to his pit boss and whispered something.

  “Sir, do you want to bet twenty grand on one spin?” The pit boss looked like he couldn’t have cared less.

  “That’s right.”

  “Take it,” the pit boss said to Marty, then wrote something on his clipboard.

  Marty nodded. “No more bets.”

  He cashed the forty chips in for forty thousand dollar bills and took a cab back to the Bellagio. In his room, he spread the cash out on the corner table and opened a Heineken. This seemed like something worth celebrating.

  Tommy didn’t want to wake up. “C’mon, we’re going out.”

  “Out where?”

  “Is that all you have to wear?”

  “Is that all you have to wear?”

  Matthew looked at his clothes. “Good point. Let’s do some shopping.”

  For him a black suit, black shirt and black shoes polished to a mirror shine.

  “Not bad,” the saleswoman said picking lint off his sleeves. “Not bad at all.”

  Matthew appraised himself in the full-length mirror. A new man looked back. He touched the gold band on his ring finger with his thumb. Still there.

  “Cash or charge?”

  “Cash.” He liked the sound of the word and the effect it had on the saleswoman.

  “Would you like to wear these clothes out? We can have these pants cuffed in fifteen minutes.”

  “Perfect.”

  For Tommy, a slinky black number, sleeveless, that swooped down her sides and flared out at her ankles. It was tough to find something to match her black eye. Matthew was not thrilled with the looks he was getting from the help. She looked like an expensive prostitute after a rough night. It would have to do. A dress like this was a new experience for her. She looked at herself and Matthew in the mirror as though both or either were a mirage, like she was waiting to wake up.

  He nodded to the saleswoman.

  “How about a purse?” the woman said to Tommy.

  Tommy looked at him like a daughter asking for candy or one more turn on the merry go round.

  Matthew rolled his eyes. “Why not?”

  Why not? he repeated in his head. It would become his mantra. The answer to every question. Why did she need a purse when she had nothing to put in it? Why not?

  “Would you like to see a wine list, sir?”

  “Why not?”

  “The chocolate soufflé needs to be ordered in advance. Shall I place the order?”

  “Why not?”

  “Another bottle?”

  “Why not?”

  Dinner was two martinis and two bottles of champagne between bites of some unpronounceable French dishes. Tommy was a little loopy. In the back of his mind, he knew she was receiving the by-product of his guilt. Normally it was Lu who received this shower of affection after he fucked up. He ordered a double espresso and a Louis XIV brandy and wondered what Lu was doing.

  “You’re quiet,” she said.

  “I’m always quiet.”

  “Okay, you’re silent.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Everything okay?”

  He just looked at her. She was beautiful even with the bruised eye. A chipped vase. A misfit toy. The soufflé arrived.

  “What do you want to do next?” he asked.

  “You want to go dancing?”

  “Why not?”

  The name of the club was Rain. At Mandalay Bay.

  At the door, they asked how old Tommy wa
s.

  With a crisp Ben Franklin in his palm, Matthew shook the bouncer’s hand. “A hundred.”

  “Right this way, folks.”

  After a few drinks, Matthew was a pretty good dancer. Tommy could have just turned in place and looked good, but she was into it. Bad club music assaulted the crowd, beating them into submission until everyone moved in unison, making the most of it, riding it like a wave. She seemed to know every word to every song. At least every chorus. He didn’t recognize one. After about five songs, he headed to the bar. Tommy found some new dance partners. Her sunglasses reflected the smoke and strobe madness happening in time to the music. He watched for a little while but had to keep moving or he’d fall asleep. He waved to her, motioned that he was leaving. She waved back, kept dancing.

  When he left the club, he started to catch the Vegas buzz.

  The slots chirped and chimed as he walked into the casino. It was like strolling along a well decorated cavern in hell. The dealers all had horns on their heads and behind their smiles; they hated him. He sat next to three Asian girls who didn’t look old enough to be walking the streets of Bangkok let alone sitting at a blackjack table in Vegas. One of them wore a belly shirt that partially exposed an elaborate snake tattoo along her spine. Matthew threw five hundred dollars on the table. The girls seemed impressed. They gambled about as well as they spoke English, but they were having fun. He couldn’t remember or pronounce their names so in his head he just called them Larry, Curly and Moe. The dealer’s name was Kurt.

  “Like Waldheim?”

  “Like Vonnegut,” the dealer replied and Matthew tipped him.

  Moe, who sat at third base, kept taking Kurt’s bust card and giggling as Kurt drew seven and eight card hands of twenty one. Matthew kept slamming his head on the table after losing with nineteen and twenty.

  After about four martinis, he was having trouble adding. Still, his stacks of chips grew and the girls laughed. Things were getting blurry. It felt like he saw all of this happen at the end of a long corridor.

  “Sir, I’m right here.” Kurt’s voice was far away. “No need to shout.”

  Matthew cut the deck. “Thin to win!” he hollered and the girls clapped. Their eyes and teeth twinkled in the gin-soaked light. Kurt’s shuffling was fascinating. He seemed to be underwater. The whole casino was submerged. Matthew wondered what kept everything from floating away. One of the girls, Curly maybe, winked at him and explained that she had to powder her nose. They all looked at him expectantly. His soggy brain finally grasped what they meant.

  “Oh,” he said.

  He looked at Kurt. Kurt smiled back.

  “What do you say, Kurt?”

  Kurt raised one eyebrow like Mr. Spock. “I think you should split ’em.”

  Matthew looked back at the girls and squinted.

  Kurt cleared his throat. “The aces sir. You should split the aces.”

  “Right.” Matthew placed another stack of chips next to the first.

  Kurt split the aces and dealt one queen and then another. “Nice split, sir.”

  The girls cheered. After Kurt paid out, they stood. Matthew looked at Kurt and motioned helplessly from the girls to the chips in front of him.

  “Can I change this for you, sir?”

  Matthew nodded.

  In a blur Kurt placed a short stack in front of him. Matthew picked it up.

  “Shall we go to my room?”

  The girls grinned and nodded.

  He felt like a ball in a pinball machine. They passed the same cashier three times before they took the left at Albuquerque to get to the elevators. The four of them got on an elevator with an older couple in their sixties. The girls got a bad case of the giggles. Matthew grew tired of the mirrors everywhere. He looked drunker than he thought he was. The girls playfully slapped each other. As the older couple got off the elevator, Matthew and the man exchanged glances. The man smiled and rolled his eyes. The man’s wife wrapped an arm around her husband and leaned her head on his shoulder. Matthew looked at himself in the mirror again, a look nobody but Matthew would ever see. He missed Lu. The bell rang as they reached his floor. He was the last one off.

  Now that the girls were out of their assigned seats, he had no hope of keeping their identities straight. One of the girls made neat lines of cocaine on the glass table in the corner. It helped, or seemed to. He concentrated on the one with the snake tattoo while the other two bled into the background. After a few lines, he went to the bathroom to splash some cold water on his face and try to tame his wild hair. His eyelids were stuck at half-mast. The three stooges snorted lines and rifled through the mini bar. Their giggles sounded like glass breaking. He wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Maybe go back in time and smack himself around.

  Someone was knocking on a door. Matthew splashed some more water on his face.

  Nobody outside the bathroom door. The knocking got louder. Nobody in the hallway outside. It was Tommy next door.

  Something shattered against their shared wall.

  The girls turned to stone.

  A deep, male voice hollered, “Stop knocking!”

  Tommy sobbed. Knocking turned to pounding. The adjoining doorway, Tommy had opened her door.

  When he opened his door a Heineken bottle sailed through the doorway, hit the open door, but didn’t shatter. Tommy was huddled on her knees in front of Matthew.

  “Shut that fucking door and get the fuck back in your fucking room man!”

  Matthew turned to see a tall, thin man with blonde hair wearing an unbuttoned shirt and pointing. Surges of cocaine and adrenaline swelled his heart.

  He took a step into the room. “How’s that?” The tall, blonde man’s finger continued to point but he took a step back. The man did not repeat himself. Matthew’s face burned and his ears pounded with rushing blood. Behind him, the hazy noise of the three stooges making a hurried, clumsy exit.

  It was over quick.

  She finally grabbed Matthew’s arm; he had somehow gotten hold of a Heineken bottle. The tall, blonde man dragged himself to his feet and lurched out of the room. Matthew dropped the bottle. He looked at his hands. The knuckles were bruised and bleeding. I’m gonna feel that in the morning, he thought. There was blood under his fingernails.

  Tommy was crying. He held her in his arms. After a while, he lifted her featherweight body onto the bed. “I’m so stupid.” Her face was crinkled and pink and wet.

  Matthew shrugged. She looked very young and very stupid, but he was the stupidest one in the room.

  “How about a drink?”

  “Sure.”

  He heard her change channels as he filled three glasses with ice. Outside the window, the still lagoon burst into a dance of water and light, spoiling the glowing outline of the Eiffel Tower. We’ll always have Paris, he thought wistfully. He made two gin and tonics. The third glass was for his hand.

  After he got back, she was snoring. He sat next to her dreaming body on the bed and put one hand into the glass of ice. On television, an old rerun of Starsky and Hutch, the one where Hutch got hooked on heroin and Starsky had to find him and rescue him. After the second gin and tonic, he put his other hand into the ice and shivered until his hand went numb. Hutch was trying to get clean in Huggy Bear’s apartment. Strung out, he kept trying to escape. Matthew watched Tommy sleep. Waiting for her eyes to open, he fell asleep.

  When he woke up, Matthew felt like a giant had been shaking him all night. He blinked in the piercing brightness. His mouth and throat were raw like someone had taken a nail file to them. All he tasted was dried saliva. His hands were still in the glasses, but the ice had melted. Thirsty, he took a gulp then gagged at the warm, bloody flavor. Swallowing was pain. The liquid curdled in his angry stomach. He rushed to his bathroom to vomit. First the rusty water, then just bile. His stomach contracted over and over. When he was done, he lay on the cool tile floor watching the ceiling spin. The floor rocked beneath him. He shivered, his teeth chattered, his hands throbb
ed.

  Finally the spinning stopped, he pushed himself carefully off the floor like the lone survivor of an Indian massacre, found the cold water knob in the sink, and turned it open all the way. He would not look at himself in the mirror. Nothing he wanted to see there. Dipping his head into the sink, he did his best to remove the smell and taste of vomit. His shirt was wet so he took it off. He went to his bed, took off his shoes and socks, passing out on top of the sheets.

  He jumped when he felt a hand on his arm. His head regretted it. “You’re a light sleeper.”

  He put a hand to his temple.

  “How you feeling?” She whispered as though her parents were sleeping at the end of a hallway.

  “I’ve felt worse.”

  “Really?”

  “Not much worse.”

  She nodded. One of his t-shirts covered her to mid-thigh. Her bare, child’s legs dangled off the bed, socked feet swayed above the floor.

  “Sorry about that guy.”

  Matthew rolled his eyes. “Oh yeah.” His sore knuckles reminded him. “You might want to be more careful.” He winced at how much he sounded like his father.

  Instead of listening, she seemed to study him.

  “Where did this one come from?” She touched the tender tissue on his left wrist.

  “When I was in the sixth grade, I was skateboarding down my driveway and fell off.”

  It was the first bone Matthew had broken. He remembered the day. Warm September. Indian summer. Apple season. Scabs of color decorated the green trees. Their driveway wasn’t the smoothest. An asphalt lip separated it from the street. “It’s hard to picture you as a skater.”

  “It wasn’t like I was a skater. I was just skateboarding. Actually I think it was technically my brother’s skateboard.”

  It had been Mark’s board. Bright red. Matthew couldn’t remember the actual fall. Remembered being sprawled on the street and then picking himself up. The first thing he felt was a skinned knee. Mark was playing with some of the neighborhood kids in the front yard. He noticed Mark looking at his wrist.

  “So you broke it?” she said.

  “My wrist? Yeah, pretty badly. That scar,” he touched her finger as it traced the thin, white line, “is where the bone popped out.”